Doughnuts had their day.
Oh, we still eat them. Frankly, I’d eat a dozen right now if my wife would let me. But their fluffy, high-fat, glazed goodness is less appreciated in our more health-conscious age, and stand-alone doughnut shops are about as scarce as beaver-hat boutiques these days. The rare doughnut eatery to survive in the 21st century must have something special going for it.
Something superior, you might say.
Chicago’s Superior Donuts is, admittedly, a dinosaur of a business—just like the guy who owns it. Arthur Przybyszewski opened the thing in 1969 and has seen no reason to change anything for the last 40-odd years. I suspect even the grease in the shop’s ancient deep-fat fryer is original.
But time has been hard on Arthur’s sugar-sprinkled concoctions. And even the best of businesses can grow a bit stale. Enter Franco Wicks, a hip young employee who believes he can help Superior not just survive, but thrive. All it takes is a little know-how, a little innovation and maybe a WiFi hotspot to keep the people streaming through the doors. (Oh, and maybe a little sriracha, too. Old-fashioned Boston cream is soooo 1990.)
CBS’s Superior Donuts mines much of its comedy from generational differences—a setup we’ve seen before. Why, even CBS’s own sitcom The Great Indoors is predicated on this clash of old vs. new, with Joel McHale’s wizened Jack Gordon trying to teach a handful of Millennial pups that life extends beyond their smartphone screens.
Superior takes the same setup and flips it: Here, young Franco is the teacher, not the clueless student, encouraging Arthur to set aside his typewriter and learn to Skype a little. The donut shop could clearly use some updating, and Franco gently guides Arthur through this strange, sometimes painful process of change.
They’re joined by a motley band of donut shop regulars: ‘Tush’ Tushinski, who runs a series of makeshift, seat-of-your-pants businesses from Superior; Fawz, the dry-cleaning tycoon who wants to put Superior out of business (even though he buys coffee there every day); idealistic college student Maya, who spouts Bernie Sanders’ slogans behind her laptop. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a doughnut shop without a couple of police officers in house: officer Randy DeLuca and her geeky partner, James Jordan.
Together, they all form a tight-knit (if dysfunctional) family of sorts, all united around Arthur’s jelly-filled calorie bombs. It’s a little like Cheers, perhaps, with doughnuts instead of beer and a canned laugh track subbing in for actual laughs.
Superior Donuts, the show, feels about as anachronistic as the shop itself, what with its two-camera format and setup-punchline patter. The jokes can taste a bit stale as well. And while these characters do care about one another, it’s hard to give the show too much credit for this. I mean, I don’t know how many folks would tune into a sitcom where everyone despised each other.
But when I tuned in, I was hoping that if Superior Donuts wasn’t original, at least it’d be relatively clean. Most of its episodes bear a TV-PG rating, which encouraged me. That was before I watched the thing. Alas, this doughnut shop has a few holes in it.
Probably the biggest drawback here is the language. While we don’t often hear much stronger than “d–n” or “h—,” we hear a steady patter of those words and other mild profanities. Sexual innuendo can be found in the deep-fat fryer as well.
Arthur, a diehard Chicago Cubs fan, has never missed an opening game in his entire life. But this year he finds that he can’t score any tickets. Now, he’ll do whatever it takes to get them, even if it means getting them from Franco’s cousin, Morgan, who also happens to be an ex-con—and, coincidentally, is looking for a job. Police officer Randy, meanwhile, goes undercover at the game to try and catch people selling Cubs tickets illegally.
Arthur is hesitant to hire Morgan when Franco suggests he work as a delivery man. “Once a con, always a con,” Arthur says. Arthur and the rest of the gang make other jokes about ex-convicts. Characters discuss the ups and downs of marriage, including how boring it can be … except for the sex. (And even that’s not always that exciting, someone suggests.) Someone mentions going on a blind date with handcuffs in tow. Other jokes include sexual references, a mention of “lady parts,” fights with drunken men, murder, violence and the consumption and selling of drugs. Someone makes a careless joke about a man who has just died and his widowed wife. Native Americans are offhandedly referred to as “scalpers.”
God’s name is misused four times and the words “d–mit,” “d–n,” “a–,” “p–sed” and “shut up” are used once or twice.
When Franco drops his laptop in a vat of grease, he’s suddenly in the market for another one. His minimum-wage job doesn’t allow for that sort of purchase, so he takes a second job as a personal assistant to Fawz—Superior’s landlord and Arthur’s insensitive foil—to make some extra cash.
Franco drops his laptop in the grease after his girlfriend apparently strips off her shirt to show Franco her bra. (We don’t see the bra, but we do see her beforehand on Franco’s laptop, and her shirt does reveal a bit of cleavage.) He talks about how the laptop saw him through many milestones—not just college and graduation, but various tawdry phases: “My Asian-girl phase; my big-butt phase; my big-butt, Asian-girl phase …” Tush suggests that another fetish (revolving around “long-haul lady truckers”) could be on the horizon. Cops Randy and James compare their expertise in penal codes, alluding to the double entendre the word implies. Randy mocks James’ geekiness, telling him that all the Comic-con-like events he wants to attend are “virgin-cons,” too. Tush tries to flirt with Maya. Maya laments how much she needs to have sex.
Fawz is called a racist and a misogynist, and he indeed hires Franco primarily to impress some black business owners. There’s a reference to meth use. Randy brags that she writes 15 tickets in three hours, picking off the “public urinators” around Chicago’s Wrigley Field one by one. Tush, who has taped money to his stomach, lifts up his shirt to pay Arthur. When Arthur says that he’s 25 cents short, Tush reaches to another place on his chest for change. “I hope this is a quarter, not a nipple,” he says.
Characters say “d–n” eight times, as well as a few uses of “a–,” “b–ch” and “h—.” Franco calls his girlfriend “honeybutt” (a word echoed by Arthur), and someone uses the word “sucks.”
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).
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